To mark International Women's Day 2018, I put together a step by step animation of my sketch of my wife, Amy. She’s often posed in the past for portrait demonstrations and helps me behind the scenes by running my website and admin. She has had a difficult time of late, in November 2017 she had a heart attack, out of the blue, one morning, with no prior signs or symptoms.

It wasn’t a regular heart attack, there is no heart disease or high cholesterol, she suffered something called a Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection or ‘SCAD’. Two artery branches in her heart dissected, disrupting the blood supply and causing an acute non-stemi myocardial infarction. The reason I’m posting about this, is because statistics show that women are twice as likely to die from a heart attack than men, this is due to a number of reasons, one being that for women symptoms manifest differently to men, are often disregarded and chalked up to being emotional rather than physical.

Thankfully, in Amy’s case, her symptoms were severe enough for our GP to immediately call an ambulance. Swift treatment has meant there has been no muscle damage to her heart, our hope is that soon we will find out if the dissected arteries have healed and fingers crossed she may be able to reduce the medication she’s currently on.

If a women you know is suffering from unexplained chest pain, it’s always safer to get it checked out.